Abstract

Looking at the current turmoil facing contemporary healthcare systems worldwide, resulting from relentless imposition of financially-based performance indicators, the author argues that a return to a values-based approach to healthcare will create positive transformation. Writing from the fresh perspective of social anthropology, the author takes a highly pragmatic approach to practice, emphasizing the importance of values such as compassion, solidarity and social justice. He suggests that without being able clearly to identify the values and goals that unite their members, healthcare organizations are unlikely to be able to meet the demands of the constant and varied pressures they face, and explains how individuals at every level in healthcare can contribute in practical ways to positive change within their organizations.

This much-needed and very accessible book will be essential reading for anyone interested in a better approach to healthcare reform, from clinicians and nurses, to managers and policy makers, as well as the interested reader.

Humanizing Healthcare Reform is essential reading for all those interested in a structured approach to healthcare reform, from clinicians and nurses to managers and policy makers.
Nursing Standard

In Humanizing Healthcare Reforms, Arbuckle excises the dialogue out of the conventional logic that has been so unsatisfying in solving the challenge of healthcare, drawing us into a credibly optimistic conversation in which cultural understandings make transformative change imaginable. His deeply provocative, delightfully articulated, and thoroughly constructive text fills an important gap in the debates about healthcare system reform, reviving the essence of the moral and spiritual ideals that led to the development of healthcare systems in the first place and offering a practical guide to enacting them through visionary and strategic leadership.

Arbuckle speaks the language of the idealist and committed people who struggle to solve the problems of healthcare in our modern age, and offers them a new way forward.

Professor Sally Thorne, University of British Columbia School of Nursing, Vancouver, Canada
This book is a useful mirror for managers and clinicians to reflect on and mitigate their own responses to structural change.
Allyson Pollock, Professor of Public Health Research and Policy at Queen Mary, University of London
Gerald A. Arbuckle, PhD, is a Cambridge University trained anthropologist and a cultural and organisational consultant to public and private healthcare systems in the United States, Canada, and Australia. A former director of the national board of St Vincent's Health, Australia, he was appointed in 2008 by the Government of New South Wales to the Independent Panel to oversee the reform of the state's public hospital system. During 2010 he worked at Campion Hall, Oxford University, researching issues confronting the National Health Service in England. In 2011 he gave the Martin D'Arcy Memorial Lectures at Oxford University upon which this book is based. Gerald lives in Sydney, Australia.